I used to be VERY JUDGY about the words “emotional eating”. If you’re like I was, then instead maybe you:
- Overeat
- Stress eat
- Mindlessly eat
- Comfort eat
- Binge eat
- Anxious eat
- Anger eat
- Sad eat
- Eat because “I want it”
- Overeat because “it tastes good.”
- Overeat because “You can’t tell me what to eat!”
- Eat because “I deserve it…it’s been a long day!”
If you are eating for any other reason besides physical hunger (like any of the examples above), then yes my love… those are emotional reasons to eat.
AND… as your coach is my job to point out bling spots that keep you trapped in the vicious cycle of emotional eating.
So that’s my main intention in this video… to help you truly start untangling this painful relationship with food that can often feel like we’re not in control… the damn food is!
Watch to learn:
1️⃣ The process to decide if you are ready to end emotional eating
2️⃣ Hand you the most powerful next steps to truly end the vicious cycle starting TODAY (if you’re ready)
3️⃣ Give you powerful tips on what it actually takes to shift out of old eating patterns and into your more empowered self who is ready to be finished with the old behavior.
Audra.
Full Episode Transcript:
Hello, hello, we are live.
Audra here, founder of Hello Body Freedom. I help women heal and basically heal the deeper reasons why we struggle with our bodies and struggle with food and struggle with weight.
In the first place, it runs so much deeper than a diet. It runs so much deeper than hitting the gym. So, I’m really excited to be here with all of you. And today we are here talking about one of the big ones, which is a relationship with food that feels like maybe food is in control and not you. And so, let’s go ahead and dive in.
If you were watching the replay, hashtag replay down below. Would love to hear from you and see that. And if you’re here live, come say hi. I want to see your comments. I love when you are here live. It always just has such an amazing feel.
And again, we’re talking today about something that I will say flat out, that I used to be incredibly judgy over and I did not think it applied to me. And, so maybe you’re judgy, maybe you’re not judgy, but maybe you don’t think it applies to you, which is the words emotional eating.
And I will tell you that I would hear those words back in my 20s and early 30s and I would kind of get like repulsed or disgusted would be the field because it would be like, ew, that’s definitely not me. Like there was so much, like of a shame body around if you were an emotional eater or something that eventually we have to learn how to let that shit go.
Because let’s just talk about what emotional eating actually is. And maybe you might see your own behaviors in this. So ultimately, the really positive right relationship with food is eating because you’re actually physically hungry, and then you eat whatever you want.
You eat the thing that seems like the right meal for that moment. And then you enjoy it. You’re satisfied. And you stop when you feel enough, when you’re satisfied. And so, anything out of that context can begin to turn into some really strange ways of eating.
So, when we’re not eating for physical hunger, and we’re eating for a whole lot of other reasons, that could be a problem. So, for instance, if you eat when you’re stressed out, if you consider yourself a mindless eater, I work with a lot of women that just go, I just go blank. I go numb. I don’t think about it. It just kind of is happening.
Or comfort eating, like you’re sitting at home alone and you sit at home alone every night. Or maybe your kids are, you’re an empty nest here, your kids are gone or your partner’s on a trip or something like that. But something where it’s like, oh, I’m eating this food to feel comforted.
Another way that we eat is when we’re anxious or when we’re angry or when we’re sad. And those maybe sound like very typical reasons to emotionally eat. But what about I’m eating because I want it? I’m eating because it tastes good. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s just that if that is the reason you’re eating and it’s totally disconnected from hunger, you’re just eating at the whims of the emotions I’ve wanted and because it tastes good, right? Or how about, you know, you’re overeating because, well, you can’t tell me what to eat, watch me eat whatever I want, right? This is very like rebellious eating.
Or the very intense, “like I deserve this. It’s been a long ass day. I’ve been everything to everybody and I’m exhausted. The day is over. The kids are in bed and this is my me time, my alone time. Damn it. I deserve this.” It’s like you’re only reprieved for the entire day.
And what makes all of these difficult is that first off, none of them are wrong, right? It’s just a matter of if you are doing it outside of actually being physically hungry. And if you are feeling as though every time you feel a feeling, sad, anxious, bored, lonely, stressed, scared, I feel like it. I want it. I deserve it. It tastes good.
You’re always the reason you’re eating. You’re very likely struggling with food and your relationship with food. You’re very likely struggling with weight. And all of this is a big part of the puzzle here.
So, eating for any other reason besides physical hunger, these are emotional reasons to eat, right? So, you might not identify with the word emotional eater, but if you identify with eating when your nervous system is dysregulated, eating for a quadrillion other reason besides physical hunger, then there’s definitely some untangling that needs to happen if indeed it is getting in the way.
And so, as your coach, I think it’s my job to just point out blind spots that might be keeping you trapped in this vicious cycle. So, I have a lot of women that come into the path to freedom challenge or come into Hello Body Freedom. And their first thing is I don’t feel like I have control.
I feel like food has control, right? And I just want you to know that pointing out your blind spots is it’s my intention today. I really want to help you untangle this. If it is a painful relationship, for some people it’s not a painful relationship at all.
I swear my husband is an insane emotional eater. And I look at him going like, man, but he has zero issues with weight. He’s incredibly healthy. He has absolutely no qualms with what he’s eating, when he’s eating, how he’s eating it, and it doesn’t affect him at all. There’s no shame body around it.
And I’m like, you do you, babe, right? So, what I’m here is that if it is bothering you, if it is a struggle for you, then it is my intention today to help you start to untangle this, okay? Because it can be incredibly painful. This is an incredibly painful relationship with food, and it does suck. Like when it feels like we’re not in charge, it totally sucks.
And so I’m going to go ahead and I keep forgetting to do this, but I’m going to remember today. And I’m going to put down, what is it? Oh, it’s down here. It’s way down here. There we go. I’m going to put this ticker on because this is basically the way that we would start to get this solved.
So, if you are listening to this and any of this resonates with you, then I hope that you follow the link below and we can have ourselves a conversation for sure. So again, this can be a real, real challenging piece for us.
So, if you, again, if you don’t like the words emotional eating, just call it whatever you want. Call it I mindless eat, I stress eat, I anxious eat, I comfort eat, I bored eat, right? Bored is an emotion. It’s a feeling that doesn’t feel good. So, what do we do? We eat to change boredom, right? So, there’s a big excuse that has really been popping up lately that I’ve, I’m hearing a lot.
And, I think that this is an important conversation to have because, you know, we’re sitting here struggling with our bodies, struggling with our relationship with food that doesn’t feel good. And what this is, is that it’s, it’s an important excuse that we need to look at.
And, I get this excuse every time I run a five-day challenge when people are really seen like this rolled out in front of them, this way to truly untangle emotional eating to truly get to the other side of feeling freedom around food, right? And I think that it’s a problem because, and we do talk about this inside of the path to freedom challenge, we’re going to open up the wait list later this week.
I’ll let you guys know about it. But ultimately, it’s that, you know what, when, when life gets a little easier, I will deal with it then. You know what, there’s just too much going on, graduations right around the corner, started a new job. You know, the kids are doing this, the partners doing that.
When all of this settles down, then I will deal with this. And, and I’m just curious if that’s something that you’ve been saying to yourself, right? When these times have changed, it’s just too crazy right now. When everything calms down, then I will work on this. I will work on my, my body. I will work on healing my relationship with food. I will work on it then.
Okay. So, there are two things about this that I want you to know right now. The very first thing I want you to know is that that’s totally okay. Right, and I want you to really hear this, that, when we are using food to fix how we feel over and over and over again, it is a coping mechanism that you learned a very, very long time ago in order to soothe anxiety, to kind of mediate the pain that you’re feeling, to help soothe grief, right? Just anything that doesn’t feel good.
I mean, even as simple as while I’m bored, I’m going to eat. Like you’ve learned how to use it as a coping method. And so, if there’s ever a time to be gentle with yourself and to feel a lot of compassion for all of your feelings and realize that what you’re experiencing is totally okay. Like it is okay. All right.
Now is the time to really just be gentle with yourself. If now is not the time, if you really are like, no, I’m going to wait, like coming into a place of I’m okay with that full stop period. It hasn’t been fixed for now and I don’t in the foreseeable future see a possibility of fixing that. So, it’ll be dealt with later.
What a lot of us do is we make ourselves wrong for feeling that way, wrong for believing that, right? And that can actually cause even more pain and suffering and even more emotional eating because you’re just like, you know, putting like guilt and shame on top of an already strong loop of using food as a fix, right? So deep breath.
If it’s not the right time, one of the best gifts you can give yourself is to own it and just be okay with it. Like it will literally create a relaxation response in you probably. Okay. So that’s the first thing. If you are a no, if you are, I will deal with all this once life is over, once life gets easier and you’re a no great.
And number two that I want to talk about, I got a lot of women through this journey. And so, I really want to make sure that you see the truth in the light that might be underneath all of this that’s just beckoning to be heard. Okay.
So, when you were saying, I’m just going to wait till life gets easier. I’m going to wait till this all blows over. I don’t have time to deal with, with my health. I don’t have time to deal with my body. I don’t have time to deal with, you know, food always being in control and I’m sugar addicted and all these things, right?
When you’re saying things like I’m just going to wait until all of this blows over and then I’ll be ready. I just want you to really hear that this is a false protection and it’s a defense, right? It’s a defense mechanism that ultimately if we were able to look underneath that it’s, it’s always fear of change, always, right?
As soon as somebody says, “Oh no, I can’t emotionally eat anymore.” Now you’re scared. You can’t have donuts anymore. You can’t have your, it’s like, it’s, it’s absolutely rooted in fear and rooted in change. Okay.
So, when we say, you know what, I’ll just deal with this later on our time for this shit right now, that is fear of change hiding behind emotional eating. Okay. Now, very important that you hear this.
I want you to try to feel into this truth without, without judging, without badmouthing yourself, right? And really just like looking with clear eyes because self-sabotage really seems true. Well, I really don’t have time right now. I’m really busy with this or that, right?
But I just want you to tune in because truth is truth, right? There’s no need. We don’t have to add blame or shame that we don’t have to add like an inner bitch beat down to it, right? My intention is to talk about what it means to truly end emotional eating. Okay? My intention here is number one, that you don’t get stuck in it if you don’t want to. Okay?
And number two, if now’s not the time and you do want to, it’s totally okay, right? Be gentle. And number three, I do want to help you kind of move into a choice and move into the direction toward what is real and what is true for you right now. Okay?
Because the thing is, is that, when we keep using excuses to not like heal and live a life that we know that we can live with thriving and feeling good in our body and we keep saying, oh, I’ll deal with it later.
Ultimately, what you’re doing is you’re making a decision based on circumstances completely outside of yourself, right? You likely had this excuse pop up the last time something big came up and then that finished. And then the right, it’s like, there’s always a reason not to. You know what I mean? And so, spoiler alert, I want you to really hear this. Life doesn’t get less crazy. Okay?
There are ebbs and flows and what you are going through now likely is just exacerbated by using food to cope, right? And it’s just, we think that we’re just waiting for this like, you know, greener pastures over the hill or something like that. But that’s just not how life works, right? There’s always going to be something.
And anytime we make decisions based on all of these outside things outside of us that are happening, instead of based on our own inner truth, y’all, we’re building like a house of cards. We’re building a house on sand, right? It’s not sustainable because it’s always going to be the circumstances that are changing.
There’s always going to be a situation here or a job thing here or a friend thing here or a family thing here, right? These are all situations and circumstances outside of you. Okay? And what we really need to do is get to the core of ourselves and make decisions for ourselves based on what we are truly feeling called toward. Okay?
And so, what I’m really asking is what is your heart’s true? in Because what a lot of us do is we live in fear. We live on too scared to do this I don’t want to do that. We live in this sense of fear. But when we instead stop living where fear runs a show, but instead we’re tuning into our deepest truths, these like heart’s desires. Okay. So, I want to invite you to get out of your head and get into your heart, get into your desires, right?
And if it feels good to place a hand on your heart, I like to place a hand on my heart and like right underneath right in my solar plexus. Because this is like third chakra and fourth chakra energy. Third chakra energy is like, action-oriented. And then your heart is like desire, its truth, right? And so, from here, I’m going to ask you a question. And I just want you to just tune in and answer from the heart, answer from the truth.
Do you truly in your heart, are you ready to heal your relationship with food? Are you ready to work on all the reasons that we’re eating when you’re not physically hungry, right? What it means to finally actually feel free from food. And yes, weight loss is very, very highly connected to that. Because most of the reasons why we’re overeating is because we’re eating for a million other reasons besides physical hunger, right?
And so, but you’re not, it’s not because you’re white knuckling it, right? But it’s because you’re you’re healing, like you’ve actually been able to have a bad day and not reach for food. You’re actually able to feel anxious and food isn’t the answer, right? You’re actually able to just sit and be bored and know what to do with these emotions instead of eat them away. That is healing. That is healing.
Okay. And just feel in, if any part of you said yes, if any part of you said yes at all, then I really want to encourage you to look down here and follow that link. It’s hellobodyfreedom.com forward slash chat with Audra. Hellobodyfreedom.com forward slash chat with Audra. Okay.
And the reason why this is so important is that I have not discovered from my own path, from the thousands of clients I’ve worked on with. I haven’t figured out how to get past this without actually getting help and support. Okay. And so, whenever you, you know, get on hellobodyfreedom.com forward slash chat with Audra, you can actually start to untangle some stuff immediately.
You will start to feel better today if you go to that. If you go right there and you fill out that application, you will immediately, or I guess you just, you book a call and then I’ll, I’ll reach back out to you and I’ll have you answer some questions for me because I want to make sure like it makes sense that I’m here to like help you work on emotional eating. Then you will feel better like immediately.
So, I’m just going to leave you with this. Okay. Your issues with food are rising up right now to be healed. They are there for a reason. It is a spiritual reason. I think of my emotional eating that felt so awful and so evil and I hate it so much, but at the end of the day, it keeps coming up because it’s like something deep inside of me is like ready, ready to be healed, ready for the next step.
How do we get through this? How do we process this? How do we move through this? That is the healing journey. Okay? Your issues with food are rising up right now to be healed. Okay? They are not rising up to be ignored, to be distracted from, to be shoved down. They’re not, they’re not rising up for you to shame them and blame them. Okay? This is not what’s happening.
What we want to do is we want to work with them because if we don’t work with them, we ignore them. We distracted from them. We shove them down. Then what do we do? We shove more food on top of it thinking that it’s going to fix it and it never does. What we resist persists. Okay?
And I truly believe that this is a really, really powerful opportunity for every single one of us to take our relationship with food to a new level of healing, of peace and compassion and grace. And this is what is waiting for you on the other side of healing your emotional eating Okay? Okay. I just think that it’s not meant for you to do alone.
The reasons why you’re using food as a coping strategy are usually because of severed situations in your past, severed traumas, severed relationships, right? And whenever we actually do this work together, you realize that you’re not alone You realize that so many people have exactly the same problems you do with food, right?
And my team and I are literally holding your hand the whole way. So that’s what we do. So I have walked down this journey myself I spent a good three decades of my life from somewhere around five or six years old till my mid-30s, not understanding what emotional eating was, just kind of going about, couldn’t figure out I had gained weight and lose weight.
And despite the insane amount of moving my body always had this kind of like fluff all over me. And then sometimes it would get way worse. And sometimes it would get way better. And I just had no concept of it. I had no idea, right? But the process of coming into consciousness of my behavior around food and relationship, my inability to process feelings in a real powerful, meaningful way.
When I finally got to the other side of that, which was my mid-30s, I’m now in my mid-40s, I am a decade on the other side. And I will say that for me, this path continues to be the best thing I have ever done for myself ever, the level of comfort in my body, the level of non-shame and non-guilt and non-obsession I have around food, the normal relationship that I have around food, the relaxation response I get around food.
There’s there, I don’t even remember the last time I ate something and had a guilty feeling about it. It is a, it is an untangling that is not superficial. It is deep. It takes time. But at the end of the day, there never is a right time. There is only this moment. And so, if you are tuning into the truth of where you are right now, this is an invitation to you.
Simply go there, Hello Body Freedom.com forward slash chat with Audra. Get on my calendar. And we’ll just have a conversation about it. We’ll have a conversation about it I have a lot of different ways that you can work inside of Hello Body Freedom.
Well, not a lot, but I have a few different ways that you can work inside of Hello Body Freedom that are powerful and meaningful. And if this is your year, if you are really ready to learn how to live the life that life keeps handing you and also not let the outside circumstances dictate the work that you want and need to do. If you are really ready for this level of freedom, then let’s do this. Yay!
That’s what I have for you. This is the path out of and how to end emotional eating. There is, it just doesn’t get more real than what we do inside of Hello Body Freedom. All right, my friends, I hope that this was helpful to you. I hope it served you. I absolutely love, love, love, I’m glad you made it too I see all sorts of fun people here. Thank you, guys, for coming in.
HelloBodyFreedom.com forward slash chat with Audra.
Ending emotional eating is, it can be your reality. It literally, literally can be your
reality. So, I am looking forward to reaching out. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. And let’s do this. Bye, everybody. Have a fabulous, fabulous day.
